Positive and Negative Factors in Mobile Application Development

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Methodology

Introduction

Ghauri and Gronhaug (2010) state that choice of research design can be conceived as the overall strategy to get the information wanted. Bryman (2008) suggests that it is important to do a great deal of literature review before collecting data so as to under-stand the current academic research situation and learn the work of others in the same field. Appropriate methods as such will help ensure the collected data, analysis and result persuasive and reliable. Detailed elaboration on methodology of this paper will be demonstrated as below.

Inductive and deductive

According to Ghauri and Gronhaug (2010), there are two ways to identify what is true or false and to draw conclusions: induction and deduction. In our research, inductive way of research will be considered as the main methodology. Induction is the process of observing facts to generate a theory and is perhaps the first step in scientific meth-ods (Ghauri & Gronhaug, 2010). To prepare for our research, we have to study nu-merous literatures in order to make our questionnaire and understand the answers from interviewees. Thus, our research will follow the procedure like this: observations – findings – conclusion.

Qualitative data analysis

Qualitative research is a mixture of the rational, explorative and intuitive, where the skills and experience of the researcher play an important role in the analysis of data. It is generally accepted that, for inductive and exploratory research, qualitative meth-ods are most useful, as they can lead us to hypothesis building and explanations (Ghauri & Gronhaug, 2010). For our case as an inductive research, the qualitative method will be appropriate the research focus on understanding the practical chal-lenge these companies are confronting and the way they generate their strategies ac-cording to the market.
Ghauri and Gronhaug (2010) also points out that qualitative research tends to be more explorative and un-structured, with emphasis on understanding, while quantitative re-search tends more to emphasize descriptions and testing of derived hypotheses. Mo-bile app industry is a comparatively new industry which is developing rapidly. It has similarity with traditional software development industry but also has distinguishable differences. To develop a profound research, it is better to use qualitative research ap-proach to explore this area.
Ghauri and Gronhaug (2010) consider that qualitative data to become information they must, however, be interpreted and researchers will be easily become over-whelmed by the mass of qualitative data. To avoid this embarrassing condition, we decide not to research too many companies, only seeking three successful companies which can be representative in this industry. Compared with data analysis, interpreta-tion tends to be more intuitive and subjective (Ghauri & Gronhaug, 2010).
Figure 1Main steps of qualitative research (Bryman, 2008)
According to Ghauri and Gronhaug (2010), ―In qualitative research the investigator may and often does depart from some theory. When conducting exploratory, discov-ery-oriented research with a focus on understanding and construction of explanations, the investigator often holds prior assumptions and ‗hunches‘ about critical factors and relationships.‖

Case study

In business studies, case study research is particularly useful when the phenomenon under investigation is difficult to study outside its natural setting and also when the concepts and variables under study are difficult to quantify (Ghauri & Gronhaug, 2010). On the area of marketing strategy, each company is facing to different situation and they will adapt reaction to their difficulties, so it is impossible to learn all the marketing strategy in the market. Case research, in our case, refers to qualitative and field-based construction and analysis of case studies. (Ghauri & Gronhaug, 2010) The best approach for our study, according to our study purpose, is case study.
According to Ghauri & Gronhaug (2010), the case study method is used when we want to study a single organization and we want to identify factors involved in some aspects or behavior of an organization or smaller unit. For the reason that the apps market is comparatively young and these development companies are also very young, it is not enough for us to study only one company‘s strategy. Multiple case study de-sign is considered more appropriate for studies which do not involve rare, critical or revelatory cases. (Ghauri & Gronhaug, 2010) Finally, we selected two cases to en-gage our research.

First stage – secondary data

Ghauri and Gronhaug (2010) regards secondary data is useful not only to find infor-mation to solve our research problem, but also to better understand and explain our research problem (Ghauri & Gronhaug, 2010). Literature review is necessary to struc-ture our knowledge background. To conduct deep study in real companies which are facing to practical marketing issue, literature from different angles to analyze the problem or potential issues will be discussed. Moreover, they provide a comparison instrument with which we can easily interpret and understand our primary data (Ghau-ri & Gronhaug, 2010). The content of the literature is critical to guide the researchers to build their questionnaire for the survey and provide them with ideas to analyze the data they will collect.

Literature search strategy

In order to get background knowledge, at the beginning, we searched books by the key words –―marketing‖ from the library of Jönköping University. After reading these books, we knew the marketing strategy is a very large definition for a company, so we narrowed down our research direction to the range of how to marketing their products in software industry. Then we searched many articles for journals through Google scholar which were related to ―apps‖, such as: software marketing, apps development, iOS development and apps marketing. To find latest information and views for apps industry, we changed our search measurement to use normal web search engine – Google and Baidu, to look for blogs of industry experts and reports from industry consultant companies because there were few articles were in this area.

Literature classification

Literature review brought a great amount of knowledge and interesting perspectives for us. The literature mainly comes from four different sources.
The first kind of source comes from typical and authoritative books in the area of marketing and management. These books comprehensively interpret the knowledge of marketing, marketing strategy and strategic planning. These concepts are relevant but distinguishing. Several ways to evaluate the marketing strategy and strategic planning are introduced and adopted for the analysis.
Secondly, new books written by famous industry experts or experienced developers introduce the normal procedure of developing an app and the usual ways to market the apps. Moreover, relevant articles from Internet (blogs and forums) by famous analysts and senior former manager of successful IT companies are also very valuable to study. Although these articles are not published by any press, the way of thinking and the discussion are really rational and profound. They discuss the factors which should be considered during the marketing process, rigorously analyze the difficulties, profit and cost of Apps developers from different angles with precise mathematical approaches. From some articles which present the weakness of apps store, it is clear that not all the people are optimistic to the apps market in the next few years. The truth is, as the competition getting fiercer, the marketing strategy is becoming more important to de-velopers.
Thirdly, Apps development is a specific type of software development, so relevant ac-ademic articles about marketing of software industry are also useful to reflect some problems which also exist in apps industry. For example, as high-tech and innovative industry, the intellectual property protection can also be a serious problem for apps industry. Specific channels of marketing by Web2.0 also need to be discussed for those channels which have already become the most popular and effective ways for developers to market their products.
Finally, scientific papers written by Scholars to research software industry provide us many special views about the software market. Although these researches will be en-gaged in specific region and time period, their research questions can still tell us the problems in this industry. Some questions which have been researched by other re-searchers are still meaningful for us to study.

Second stage – primary data

Set the question list

The selection of information to be collected and to be analyzed, according our re-search topic, have to be carefully considered and well organized. To understand prac-tical situation of each company and their marketing strategy, open questions are most suitable for our paper. Open question will not force interviewees to answer in the same terms as those foisted on them by response choices (Bryman, 2008). The ques-tions we set were not totally the same to all the interviewees. After finishing the first interview, answers would be understood and analyzed. Based on specific circum-stance from respective companies, more developed questions would be made for se-cond interview.

Seek research targets

As soon as the research topic and research questions are confirmed, the companies which are to be research targets should be determined. Our procedures of looking for companies are as follows:
1. Look into the most popular and authoritative mobile phone forums and check whether there are special sections which are for developers to communicate and post their project information. In the developers‘ sections of forums there are sep-arate parts for different companies.
2. Select several companies which have most projects and most participants in the forum.
3. Visit the website of the companies to know the detail of the companies, including the project history, company culture, company scale and their business condition.
4. Eliminate the companies we consider are not successful and not proper for our re-search. Finally, there are 6 candidates in our list for the next step.
 Contacting the companies
We will mainly contact the selected companies via internet since all of them are locat-ed in China. On the webpages of these companies, there is contact information for sales representatives and customers support. The information will all involve QQ ID, telephone number and email address. For us, using QQ to contact is the most instant and easiest way to contact these IT people. QQ is instant messaging software which is developed by Tencent Company and used in China with the highest popularity. We contacted the staff in these companies and asked whether they could help us to finish our research. For the reason of time difference, the invitations we sent could not be replied instantly. Sometimes invitations need to be sent again and again to get re-sponse. This could be explained partly because of their overwhelmed workload. Final-ly, we successfully contact staff in three companies that agreed to accept our inter-view.
There were difficulties on the way of interviews such as late response. When we con-tacted one of the companies and no one replied, we tried every way to send email to get in touch with them. The following is our email template translated from Chinese:
Dear Mr.Zhulianxing,
We are two master students in Sweden who are studying information technology and innovative management. Now we are writing our master thesis to do a research on the marketing strategy of mobile application development companies. We want to interview you and ask some questions.
Your company is a leading company and also the first generation of app develop-ers in China, so information from you will be very important and valuable for us. We have tried to contact the QQ on your company‘s website. However, unfortu-nately, we could not get in touch with you. We have already prepared question-naire. If you agree, we can send you our questionnaire immediately. We are look-ing forward to your response. Thank you very much!
Yours Sincerely
Letian Wang & Hao Wang
QQ: 188766711
Email: letianwong@vip.qq.com
Table 1Email template

Semi-structured Interviewing

Interview is the most direct and efficient way to get the answer to the research ques-tion. Interviews are often considered as the best data collection methods, but it de-mands a skilled and cautious interviewer Ghauri and Gronhaug (2010). Interview will be used as the main measure to collect our primary data and it will be done all through the internet by IM software and email. This part will be the most important to the whole research, as the subjective analysis and the final conclusion will depend on the collected data. Therefore, the questions for the interview must be accurate without suggestive nature. The relatively unstructured nature of the semi-structured interview and its capacity to provide insights into how research participants view the research topic was important to us (Bryman, 2008).

1 Introduction
1.3 Purpose & Research questions
1.4 Description of the companies
1.4.1 Gfeng
1.4.2 139.ME
1.5 Terminologies
2 Methodology
2.1 Introduction
2.2 Inductive and deductive
2.3 Qualitative data analysis
2.4 Case study
2.5 First stage – secondary data
2.5.1 Literature search strategy
2.5.2 Literature classification
2.6 Second stage – primary data
2.6.1 Set the question list
2.6.2 Seek research targets
2.6.3 Contacting the companies
2.6.4 Semi-structured Interviewing
2.7 Interview guide
2.7.1 Develop research question into interview questions
2.7.2 Interview Outline
2.7.3 Interviews Results Analysis approach
2.8 Validity
2.8.1 Internal validity
2.8.2 External validity
2.8.3 Reliability
3 Theory – Frame of Reference
3.1 Summary of Our theory
3.2 Introduction of IOS Platform
3.2.1 Definition of iOS
3.2.2 History of iOS Platform
3.2.3 Applications enter the app store
3.2.4 Making an application
3.2.5 Apple store approval process
3.2.8 Positive and Negative Factors in Mobile Application Development
3.2.9 Characteristics of High-Tech Environments
3.3 Introduction of Marketing Strategy
3.3.1 Concept of Marketing Strategy
3.3.2 Marketing Planning
3.3.3 Innovative marketing in SMEs
3.3.4 Marketing Channels
3.3.5 Concepts of strategic marketing
3.3.6 Marketing on Web 2.0
3.4 Marketing Strategy Applied In Apps-making Industry
3.4.1 Paid and Free apps Strategies
3.4.2 Intellectual Property Strategy
3.4.3 Integrating social network and in-app email
3.4.4 Covering different download platform
3.4.5 Marketing though forums, micro-blogs and app reviews articles
3.4.6 Promotion
4 Interpretation
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Marketing strategies influence in Chinese Apps Industry
4.3 139.ME and Gfeng
4.4 Marketing strategies used by two companies for their typical apps
4.4.1 Colorful Aquarium created by 139.me
4.4.2 Duzhe created by Gfeng
4.5 Issues in social network strategy
4.6 Apps Marketing Strategy influence the future industry
5 Conclusion
6 Discussion
6.1 Implication for future research
6.2 Contribution and limitations of our study
Reference
Appendix
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